Wednesday, January 27, 2016

While last year marked the 10th/or 11th? anniversary of the
first live show, this year marks 10 years since the first Radioset studio album
was released. So this year I'll actually update the blog (or whatever those
things are called now) with random facts about the albums and things. And today I'll do Robot MonStar...

Robot MonStar (2011) was the fifth album. It was meant to be
a concept album, surrounding themes of science and sci-fi, and sound very
electronic and mechanical. I wanted it to be very Devo influenced. I had gotten
access to a keyboard, and spent some time playing around with it, figuring out
how to play stuff and playing with the different effects settings. I discovered
one that sounded really new wave, and kind of 8-bit. I came up with the idea
for the song Quark, and then went on
from there, coming up with similar material for a "new-wave" album. I
had a lot of ideas for gimmicks, like song titles that were highly complex math
equations. The release date of Nov. 1 was chosen so as to look like a binary
sequence (110111) when written. The album wasn’t ready in time for release in
October, due to the cover art not being complete, but ideally I would have
liked to have it out on Oct. 1 (100111), or Oct. 10 (101011). The album title was
supposed to reflect the mechanical and science/sci-fi elements. MonStar is the
name of the main villain from the mid-eighties Rankin-Bass outer-space cyborg
action cartoon, Silverhawks; and Robot Monster is the name of a 1950's sci-fi
film. The album was meant to be longer, but I was working on it at the same
time as a video project, and that ate into a lot of the time. A couple of
orphaned song ideas ending up in the video instead of being finished for the
album. But I think it holds up pretty well, and I still like it.